As one of the most anticipated movies of the year, especially for Marvel fans who have been practically salivating, it is safe to say that X-Men: First Class has lived up to the hype, providing an experience which is action-packed and engaging while adding something a little different.
There has always been plenty of scope for X-Men stories but perhaps the most interesting characters have always been Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto and their complicated relationship with each other. Before now we have not had the chance to see their personal stories and the birth of the X-Men on the big screen, which are surely worth telling. The casting of Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Magneto and James McAvoy as Xavier was just brilliant, while Kevin Bacon really reminds us of his acting credentials as the bad guy Sabastian Shaw. The rest of the cast are not too bad either, though, there were times when I thought Jennifer Lawrence was miscast as Mystique.
The movie is filled with the requisite special effects, in all the right places, and director Matthew Vaughn has also added a touch of retro here and there to help bring us back in time to when it all began, with Magneto or Erik Lensherr as a young boy torn from his mother’s arms in a Nazi concentration camp. There he meets Shaw who is hell-bent on ‘encouraging’ Lensherr’s abilites, at whatever cost. Meanwhile Xavier, lonely in his lap of luxury, discovers that he is not the only person who is different and goes on to become the foremost expert on genetic mutation.
The sixties roll in and while Lensherr is on a quest for revenge, hunting down Nazis who will lead him to Shaw, an FBI agent, Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne ) stumbles upon a deadly plot, devised by mutants, to spark all out war between the US and Russia. In a bid to stop this menace, she turns to the young Professor Xaxier for help. While still discovering their powers, and faced with a common enemy, the professor and Lensherr develop a friendship and together they find mutants to train and stop this threat to the world. However, throughout the film we begin to see the cracks in the Xavier/Lensherr friendship, and despite their bond the differences of opinion regarding the future of mutant-kind is too much, and so begins the war between Magneto’s Brotherhood and Professor X’s X-Men.
I abolutely loved this movie. If I wasn’t before I am certainly a fan of Fassbender now, he is a brilliant actor who brings a lot of substance to the young Magneto.
Verdict: 4.5/5
